Thanks your advice.

In my opinion, automated tools will help to save time, but we should not rely on it totally. We may automate some contents but we need to put in some effort to deliver quality contents also. This will create uniqeness to our blog while save some time of blogging for busy people.

(must) Only use supervised posting (nothing gets posted to the blog automatically)

1) Guest posts—>

These plugins find any new articles on article directories that fit your theme… Say (wordpress design)… So i have it post the article in my drafts folder, with the following template:

-> [My introduction text, like hey guys, this is a nice article on wordpress design by a guest poster, check it out]
-> [The actual article]
-> [The resource box]
-> [My outro for my readers]

* I just write/edit the intro/outro
** The point of this is that you can feature 1-2 relevant guest posts per week without doing too much work… You get all the related articles in your drafts folder, you just publish the ones you like.

2) Yahoo Answers

Quite a few these plugins have a “yahoo answers module”… What this is, is that it pulls all the yahoo answers related to your blog’s theme, and turns them into drafts. Here’s what My template looks like for these:

Here’s another interesting question I found at yahoo answers guys. See what [name] wants to know.

[question]

And here’s what I think the best answer is… (this is where I answer that question)

And, here’s what some of the other folks on yahoo answers answered:

[other answers].

*I put in my answer and sometimes customize the intro if needed.

STRATEGY:

Mix&Match… I have something like :
-4-5 yahoo answers I post a week, and
-1-3 guest posts (articles) I Feature
-1-3 articles I write in my own voice*
… In addition to me writing 3-4 articles from scratch a week.

*If I like the theme subject of one of these articles that end up in the drafts, but I don’t like how the person wrote it, I just write it in my own voice/opinion. Keeping the title

This a legit, value-adding way of using these tools… It allows for a busier, faster growing blog, while adding value at the same time.

**How you add value**

- The yahoo answers end up being about 70% unique content (just adding 1 paragraph answer makes for an awesome looking post) and I give an awesome to-the-point answer (these attract a lot of long-tail traffic coz they’re natural real-world questions)
- The guest posts add value to the original author (these are article from article directories with republishing rights) as the author gets a free backlink (the autoposter keeps the author box intact)… adds value to my blog (these get almost as much traffic as my original articles from scratch, and adds value to my readers (find out about other authors)
-The articles from inspired writing… As any post you would write. You just use the original article to inspire you. Its a topic you go “wow, why didn’t i think of writing that article!”… And you just write the same article in your own opinion/voice.

How it saves time:

-Yahoo answers: I get 5-6 unique pieces of content a week with basically… a total of 5 minutes work altogether… Saves a few hours of trying to think what people want to know answered. You end up just needing to write a paragraph of 30 seconds, instead of researching for 20-30 minutes.
-Article ideas – these just appear straight in your drafts… If you like the author’s original article, just click publish and you both win. If you like the point of the article, but not how its written, select the full text, hit delete, and write it in your own words… Saves hours a week of thinking what to write about.

You kindly responded to an email question about this by saying that with full feeds ‘less people visit but more people are reading’ but I think there is also a marginally reduced risk of people ripping off content with abbreviated RSS feeds.

How big that risk is who knows: I was amazed when I wrote a spoof post about the worst blogging ‘advice’ I’d come across which included an imaginary splogging system ‘Nichesplogger’ to then get an email from a reader asking for more info on it.. So I guess there’s a market!

There are some things these companies are not telling you; sure the autoblog softwares work, but many of these have codes in them that links your blogs to theirs, so that they can get free back links. What that means is that they are using your blogs to get free advertisements for them!!!

So yea, Thank You Darren for using your blog to tell people that they should not use autoblogging softwares.

One of these sites that is using my enteries simply scrapes hundreds upon hundreds of posts as extracts onto a blog with no creditials, no contact info.

Its all good experience for me in defining and tuning into the type of internet/web blogger citizen I wish to be.

Real Content Makes You King
Copied Content Makes You Miserable

cheers Darren, you’ve made my day :)

For awhile I’d been using my Friendfeed-aggregated news links to automate providing news items, which saved me heaps of time having to search for such news myself.

However, one of my Twitter followers pointed out that he’d been talking to a few other Twitterers and had come to the conclusion it wasn’t a good thing.

I did my own survey of other Twitter followers and found they too had problems with it. Extra layer of linking, for one, detracting from my usual “voice” another…you get the drift.

There was also a problem I’d noted personally…that news items often came in ten-item bursts, which I found personally not what I’d wanted.

It was a correct decision to cut out all ABC Australia news items from my Twitter feed from that aggregation, as well as Herald-Sun items.

I still leave TechCrunch and geek.com feeds from Friendfeed there, and it seems I haven’t heard anyone complaining yet. This is more newsworthy to my local followers…and it’s spread out a bit more evenly.

For a while, doing this helped me concentrate on the conversation side of Twitter, but it still had a negative effect and it was a valid point to do something to solve it.

The fact of the matter is – your content becomes junk spread over hundreds of blogs. I personally think it’s a waste of bandwidth and almost certain Google will be banning sites using these services in a near future.